Elliot Rodgers also was a rich kid, IIRC. Just thr first examples to come to mind.
But more important than the spectacular stuff, the school shootings and assassinations, are the general radicalizaton of the human population of the US.
Again, to give the first example to come to mind - wasn't not so long ago and antivaxxers were strictly Nut Fringe.
The "surplus elites" are all busy staffing the Trump administration and it explains their vengefulness to the people that they are purging. A guy like Stephen Miller has always been on the outside looking in, and now he finally has a role with the status that he thinks he deserves--so he's going to use a bunch of his power getting back at everybody in his elite high school/college who mocked and marginalized him. Same with Patel--truly chilling story in the NYT today about him going after agents who had worked on cases like Jan. 6 and the Mar A Lago shitter documents: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/us/politics/kash-patel-fired-fbi-agents.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mU8.XQT4.MuX1vh3SXWT4&smid=url-share
Perhaps it is more of an overproduction of people who believe they *should* be an elite, but they are not. That would suggest that the problem is not a lack of shared prosperity, but rather a lack of the ability to accept being ordinary.
Yeah the metaphor breaks down but I always understood elite overproduction as an expectation versus reality thing. People expecting to have elite opportunities and disappointed that they just have jobs. It’s great to have a job. It does a lot for you. But it doesn’t seem like much when you felt you were promised *important*, *fulfilling*, and visible work with all the accolades
I grew up post WW-II when nearly every person had been in the War (mostly men) or worked in the defense industry (mostly women). My father who had been at Pearl harbor on 12/7/1941 spent 4 years in the Pacific. He married my mother , who was working to build planes in CA when he was demobilized. The 1950s provided a very coherent cultural generation for the most part. 1950s life was largely carried on in very patriotic venues ( American Legion baseball fields were everywhere). Then came Korea. Most of my college professors had been in WWII or Korea. The 60s generation came of age in reaction to that era. The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. Catch-22 was published in 1961. We had people in the war who had coherent thoughts about war--Only about 25% of young men went to VN (college men got deferments until the lottery) The draft ended in 1975. I believe that is the significant point at which young men who now had choice moved into the world you describe. I don't think we ponder enough the change in men's lives after 1975.
Interesting that you couch this is terms of participation and/or adjacent to U.S. wars. I've heard a few podsters over the years say that sometimes young men languish when there isn't enough of a violent outlet around. Like they need to be able to let off some adolescent steam in order to develop right or something. Personally I think it's more of an economic thing (most young men are increasingly poorer, and therefore less attractive to potential mates), but I'm wondering if they have some sort of primal point about the whole violence outlet thing.
Btw, the Draft ended in '73, the Vietnam "war" ended in '75. It was only in my head because I recently calculated the best year to be born in America (as a white dude anyway), which is 1956. People born then would be too young for the Draft (turn 18 in '74), obviously too old for Korea, and still having a balanced timeframe including most of the best economic years of America (mid-to-late 20th century) as well as modern medicine.
Both conservatives and leftists play this game. Don't you know, when WE do it, it's only self-defense, taken in the face of outrageous provocation, at worst a justified and measured preemptive strike.
When *they* do it, it is pure hate and aggression.
Doesn't matter who your preferred "we" and "they" are.
Not all or even most conservatives will think precisely this. But the explicitly conspiratorial ones (you may have noticed there are quite a few) will produce a diverse and unpredictable variety of theories resembling this one. And the two thirds of Republican voters who think the 2020 election was stolen? If this guy ever attended a meeting of an activist group, Trump could find some language about "direct action" and describe it as a Ford Foundation-funded terrorist training camp, in which case why would the average Republican voter disagree?
“My point, which you will either accept or won’t…”
I think a lot of people will be turned off by your physics analogies. For me they work, it’s the same idea as Asimov’s psychohistory in the Foundation series which is one of my favourite stories (the OG epic sci-fi story about what if humans were predictable en masse like particles in thermodynamics. Have you read it or did you come up with this independently?)
Anyway, physics analogies aside, to me your overall thesis here is so obviously true that for people to not accept it, it’s either motivated reasoning because it’s so bleak (the implications of extremely online young men are so far-reaching that better to pretend it’s not true, something Scott Alexander has written about) or its cynical partisans trying to score political points.
For anyone who cares about societal systems-level thinking written in an accessible way that isn’t steeped in Critical Theory, I don’t see anywhere in the current world writing on this better than right here. All these Ivy humanities departments looking for a way to have useful scholarship in the post-Social Justice era should hire you.
(Totally irrelevant to the topic under discussion, but I ended up majoring in economics as an undergraduate because it was the closest field I could find to psychohistory. 😀)
I admit I'm one of those a bit "turned off" with the physics analogies. But it's not because I don't find it interesting (I do), it's just that I don't think comparing sentient beings' cause and effect to, like you say, physics particles, is an honest predictor of outcomes...even though that prediction may be reliable. I mean 'honest' in a genuine sense more than a true sense here. Despite being heavily agnostic, I do believe that we are more than the sum of our parts. In other words I don't think that human consciousness is merely a collection of the trillions of neurons firing off in our brain, but rather something more than that. I don't know what to call it.
Perhaps I'm just unable to make that leap from the millions of intricacies and raw wonder of human behavior to the stolid world of game theory predictions. Mapping out the human experience into some kind of grand equation feels just so "inhuman" to me. Maybe that's why it's hard for me to buy into it, because I'm "feeling" rather than "thinking"? As much as I find something like Asimov's Foundation fascinating, I'm also rather put off by it precisely because it attempts to reduce humanity down to mathematics. And I find that enormously depressing. :-/
FWIW, the argument is that the number of variables is massive. Massive enough to make what is actually a deterministic process appear random or unpredictable.
Yeah I get that. A zillion different paths that, unique in that they have enough inertia to free themselves from the dampening constraints, do not fly wildly out in random directions, but rather converge back to a common point in space: i.e. a spectacular act of public violence. I'm just saying it's a bit weird for me personally to dilute that down to an equation. These are human beings we're talking about, not variables.
But to argue within that premise, I'm wondering if these S.A.P.V.'s are merely the most public and vivid of outcomes from this. Like we focus on these endings precisely because they are so spectacularly publicly violent. How many others, freed of the dampening constraints, have different endings? I would argue a great amount more end in suicide (a.k.a. Spectacular Acts of Private Violence). Or even many, many times more: quietly living out the rest of your life in hopeless apathy: a.k.a Mundane Acts of Private Passivity.
All of this is to say we can process these things down into explainable mathematical theories all we want, but when we do so we (imho) tend to remove the undefinable human spirit from the equation too.
How quantum physics would affect the question of free will isn't exactly clear. It's not like quantum uncertainty manifests itself in any meaningful sense in the macro world.
I think you make a good point about the bias of visibility here. More generally, it can be awfully difficult to distinguish between "process" and "outcome" -- it's much easier to put a violent death into the "outcome" category than it is to put a multi-decade habit of video game addiction there, though one might persuasively call both things "outcomes" of the same social circumstances, the latter being much more common than the former.
But we are, by nature, primed to define spectacular acts (violent and otherwise) as "outcomes," and assign to them particular significance. Habitual behaviors, in contrast, are more likely to evade our attention.
Yeah I agree, the spectacle of it all is what draws us in.
I'm wondering what's more heartbreaking here: one man lashing out and killing someone in cold blood, or a million men living out their lives in quiet desperation? Obviously there's a whole lot in between there, not to mention all of the much more likely fulfilling lives of men on the other side of the coin. I guess focusing on the gun violence part of the 'male' problem (for lack of a better term) feels more than a little disingenuous to me because of the 99.9% of males in similar "desperate" situations that do NOT lash out with a rifle. To me, that's where the real problem lies. And not with guns themselves.
I think the danger in physics analogies is in forgetting that they are, after all, mere analogies. They will all inevitably reach their limits of comparison. The behavior of complex social/cultural/political systems is of course going to diverge from the behavior of complex physical systems.
But of course, this applies to all analogies of other subjects to human affairs, not just Freddie's. And we've got plenty of old shop-worn ones whose limitations are usually ignored (infection and disease are popular ones, are are maturation and aging, traveling, combat, sports, etc.).
So I do find value in examining novel analogies, rather than just trotting out the same ones again and again. They can help us examine things in a new way, and perhaps get at different aspects of reality more easily. We just need to remain equally conscious of their limits, and not get over-excited by their novelty.
Neither LV nor Lyapunov are physics analogies. Adapting heuristics across domains is both generally possible and scientifically legitimate, and---for a blog post---our author has done an admirable job in doing so. We may not live our lives for the sake of dynamic systems, but that does not mean we are exempt from their outcomes: no matter how complex those outcomes are.
Also, stochastic inputs work as well as deterministic ones in many dynamical systems, including these two. The free will conversation is orthogonal to the substance of the post.
There are some existentialism adjacent ideas floating around in this two part series of posts, both of which are very good. Basically, as the old slogan goes "existence precedes essence." We are thrown into the world prior to any attempt to make sense out of it. These lost young men are trying to create meaning, I agree, but what should also be highlighted is that basically everything works this way.
To put it another way. Say you were born around the year 2005. You grow up in an environment of immense political and ideological decay. You have a strong feeling that something is wrong and that society is not organized in a way that is to your liking. The traditional explanations coming from organized religion and mainstream politics are kind of like figures in a wax museum. They still exist, in so far as that can be called existing, but they are crude facsimiles of a time in which they were living and breathing with real power, explanatory or otherwise. The schools don't expose you to much else. Most people go through the entirety of their formal education without ever touching classics in the Western philosophical tradition, for example.
So, they turn to the internet to try and find answers. The whole thing goes like a bad DIY home improvement project. The advice they get is the blind leading the blind, confusion piled on confusion, and whatever ad hoc ideology they conjure up would be laughed at by a professional craftsman. I agree that this is all biproduct of ideological decay. I even see the far right "traditionalist" crowd in a similar manner, only their answer to the problem is to pretend that nothing has changed and that Christianity its associated values is something other than a museum piece in 2025.
"I even see the far right "traditionalist" crowd in a similar manner, only their answer to the problem is to pretend that nothing has changed and that Christianity its associated values is something other than a museum piece in 2025."
I'd say that the far right traddies are Exhibit A.
Sohrab Ahmari or Adrian Vermeule being two prime examples - let's pretend Americans are traditionalist Catholics when they are not and have never been, then to make the numbers sort of work we'll import lots of nominal Catholics from Latin America but we'll just pretend that they're really mostly Catholic integralists at heart but they don't know it yet and all the evidence indicates otherwise and then something happens and viola! "Muh Republic of The Virgin Mary", Sohrab is El Jefe Maximo. For the benefit of The Faith, of course.
These guys make dorm room bull session leftists look like cold calculating realists by comparison.
One thing I've been thinking about "Gen Z" as a professor who works with them on the regular is that there is a really stark break between their generation and older generations because, of course, social media. Specifically what I mean is that they expect and we are expected to (by parents, administrators) meet them on their level, to a degree. Certainty more so then when I was a student, where the expectation was that it was our responsibility to learn from older folks, not the responsibility of professors to make sure that what they teach is relatable or whatever.
What many in Gen Z do because of the cloistering into phones and social media is that they are mostly reading and interacting with folks of their own generation, the memes and the insider language and apps and all. They don't know how to interact with folks outside of their phones (e.g. yesterday I was hiking on a trail and passed a young woman looking at her phone, trying to get a signal to make sure she was on the right path. Instead of simply asking me, friendly and experienced hiker, she looked to her phone...I kept hiking). They advise each other because it seems like older generations simply don't understand them. Whether this is "true" is a moot point because that is the perception pushed forward by pretty much everyone, making their loneliness and isolation a self fulfilling prophecy.
All this talk about the harm of smartphones and the ensuing policy changes such as bans on phones in schools elides the fact that this tech divides everyone, not just Gen Z. They are made to be a scapegoat of sorts for what is clearly a much larger problem.
It's always kind of been like this though. I remember a lot of chatter when I was in college about how more people followed American Idol than political elections, which was true. Our media ecosystem, long before the phones, was built with surgical precision to entertain and monopolize attention, not to inform or educate. The phones may have made it worse, but the dynamic precedes them by many years.
The problem is, we still need meaning and explanation. You can distract yourself with reality TV or TikTok all day long, but at some point everyone starts wondering, "Why?" No amount of distraction will plug that hole, certainly not for everyone. Social media, or media in general, was not built to do this task and is very, very bad at it. It's a little like walking into a clothing store and asking where they keep the miter saws...but in this metaphor the clothing store in the only game in town.
When everything's an app, you expect things to be served up to you. If not, rank 1-star.
Even our laziness is demanded as a service. We want ChatGPT to cheat for us. Having to go out and find a classmate to write a paper for us is too much work. 1-star.
Great comment and good fresh analogies (figures in a wax museum!)
All of these old structures that ceased to have any power in about 1970 or so, but hang around like … yeah, museum pieces.
Honestly bizarre how much Millennials (I am one) and Gen-X, the generations at the peak of societal power right now, pretend that any of the old societal meaning-structures have any power anymore. For young Gen-Z men they are nonexistent.
I think you’re right. More then “they don’t have access” it is a lot like “there’s no “there” there.” I am thinking of my childhood going to temple on special holidays. Mainly I paid zero attention and counted lights and windows, but then we’d go out to lunch or have a family dinner and the whole day felt, well, whole. The temple was not so much a meaning-maker for me (although now it kind of is, though I still rarely go!) as it was a container. Most of this population is just completely uncontained. We are reaching out to them from another works entirely, and maybe it doesn’t translate. OTOH, I don’t think this is universal. My daughter loves going to temple, my son does not. But I know it serves, just as our nightly family dinners serve.
You are an excellent and thought provoking writer. I have three sons in their 20’s, I have long felt that the certain segments of society that dismiss and often demonize anything male are going to bring about terrible consequences.
Seriously Freddie, I don’t know you but have been reading you for a decade (right through Twitter meltdowns and institutionalization) and a paying subscriber for 16 months.
The idea of a mentally ill (bipolar) person in the depths of newborn baby sleep deprivation being the one to invent Asimov’s psychohistory for real is almost too pat as a story.
The problem is: so is a person descending into madness thinking equations can explain extremely complex societal phenomena when it’s actually just nonsense.
There’s really good stuff here, but given your essay the other day about feeling like you’re falling into old patterns with Substack Notes and sleep deprivation, I do confess to feeling somewhat worried about you.
Edit: yes, I did post two different top-level comments. The point of each of them is different enough (my two different reactions to this essay) that I didn’t want to combine them.
To me, this blog has always been very open about writing about these issues (in fact it’s the theme of many, many essays) and so is fair game for a comment section.
For what it's worth, the theoretical ideas in this piece seemed natural and appropriate and sober to me, not wild or fanciful or stretched. I'm a mathematician, so these sorts of models are everyday thinking for me, which probably makes my judgement either *more* or *less* relevant to assessing Freddie's state of mind. I'm not trying to do that assessment here, but I just wanted to provide a counterpoint to the "this is crazy talk" perception that naturally occurs when someone starts talking about Chaos theory. Given that this piece displays a high degree of internal coherence and real correspondence with the theory, this kind of thing isn't *necessarily* crazy talk.
Agree, from similar perspective. Applying physics model-fitting (or pure math, but more frequently physics-inflected math) to anything and everything, but especially to population-scale social dynamics and other systems is a pretty common topic of discussion among startup folks with physics, symbolic systems, data science etc backgrounds. ie Freddie’s post here is a worthy addition to one of a large number of discussions that happen hundreds (thousands?) of times each day when startup-y hard science/math model-builders shoot the shit.
There's a difference between offering mathematical concepts as a metaphor and claiming them as a dispositive description of society's behavior.
I'm comfortable with the first, not so comfortable with the second, but it may come more naturally to Marxists who are used to viewing history as a data source from which deterministic predictions about the future can be made.
I have little to add to the comments but find much of FdB’s take, which demands much from the reader, to be compelling. It has always seemed to me that ideologically pigeon-holing violent actors is a superficial and mistaken approach, so there’s that. They’ve always just seemed textbook compulsive. But noting that the building circumstances add up to a delicately balanced potential awaiting a catalyst is an observation that is borne out by a famous historical example: the beginning of World War I. If you don’t know the story check it out. We’ve been living with the consequences ever since.
I'm not any kind of mental health expert but I am a public librarian... which weirdly enough means I have lots of first-hand experience dealing with folks in the grips of paranoid delusion. I've also seen first hand a lot of the writing output of people experiencing delusion - schizophrenic glossolalia. I had a similar first impression with this piece (and moreso with the previous one), sufficiently so that I worried about Dr. deBoer's mental health. This kind of esoteric-scientific model for understanding the world is, after all, a really common manifestation of delusion. After I considered that first impression I decided it was an overreaction. I have two reasons.
One is that Dr. deBoer is presenting these ideas as metaphorical, as a useful framework for understanding a phenomenon but not as a 1:1 model. In my experience, someone presenting a paranoid delusion presents it with certainty and with the contention that it is an accurate representation of reality. Dr. deBoer is not. He is saying "here is a useful metaphor for understanding a social phenomenon."
Second and relatedly, Dr. deBoer's 'model' does not claim to predict. Rather, the whole core is that it explains why things are uncertain and unpredictable. Delusory 'models of reality' that I have seen have always purported to be accurate predictive mechanisms, usable tools. Dr. deBoer's observations in this piece and the prior one offer after-the-fact understanding and a framework to very broadly predict future trends, but do not suggest any way to actually predict events.
In short, uncertainty is baked into this framework. In my (admittedly limited!) experience, "I have a model for the world" type delusions are presented with utter certainty and make claim to total accuracy.
"I'm not any kind of mental health expert but I am a public librarian," is such an indictment of the psychiatric "system". Exactly the outcome FdB excoriates here regularly. As a public library user you have my sympathy and gratitude.
As a mathematician I am suspicious of mathematics as metaphor, but I agree that it's a dynamical system in which no individual act carries much meaning and in which ideology is not usefully considered as a controlling variable. What I think is missing here is the possibility of generational change and cultural evolution. Some of today's 20 year olds will grow up into 40 year olds with children. And by virtue of the fact that they decided to have children, disproportionately represented among them will be people who have found meaning and don't want their children to suffer the same internet disease that they suffered. New movements and new structures might emerge. (Or we all might die. That's the way evolution works.)
Except not many of them will have children at current rate. Fertility collapsing, and while there’s no stats, my guess is it’s worse along the extremely-online.
>>the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture<<
REALLY felicitous phrase, and yeah, that was my hit, too. This is a kid lashing out against his upbringing in a way that kids have been doing since time immemorial, the irony being that had he chosen to lash out in a less spectacular way so that he made it to 50, the odds are he would have ended up a Mormon Republican exactly like the rest of his family.
I disagreed completely with Kirk's ideology, but he was spot on in his analysis that young men need STRUCTURE and SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN in the physical world.
It's crazy that the Left isn't picking up on this. (No, I don't believe in "Left" or "Right" either, but often, it's a convenient shorthand.)
I think the "progressive" Left offers very clear and fixed ideology for young men to believe in. Why they're not interested is left as an exercise.... :)
I would contest this. The progressive left -- e.g. the thing that once dominated Twitter and spent the days of 2020-or-so ending careers, and now rules its Potemkin kingdom of Bluesky -- is a collection of often-contradictory memes, brought up or ignored in the constant power struggles. Not that any ideology is without contradictions, I'm afraid that's a part of being human, but it's particularly bad in this case.
But yes, we can both agree that "white man bad lol" is not a great start for a unifying ideology.
I'd say it's not the absence of these pillars of society like the family, the church in these young men's mind because many have them – the Kirk shooter seems to and many Islamic perpetrators of mass violence had community and religion. But all are unmoored by the internet's respect of no viewpoints and de-emphasis of the real world, in favour of allegiance to a thousand causes.
I think that we'll increasingly live in a time of rising violence is correct. It's a common symptom of future shock, which we are no more immune to than the anarchists of the 1900s or the 1970s. 'Futsies' as they're called in Mega City One where they're a regular occurrence...
But seriously, the mathematical models and analogies you're using do make sense to me (and the 2 or 3 nitpicks I could make don't change the fundamental validity). I also couldn't tell you if this model is empirically correct or, assuming it is, if this phenomenon is at the point of criticality, but thanks for describing a terrifying possibility!
I'm a bit of an AI doomer, but honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if AI just amplifies the term in the equation previously occupied by The Algorithm, driving up the Lyapunov exponent, leading to increasing social chaos (and Chaos) of this sort. One way or another, I'm not optimistic about the future.
Come for the social commentary, stay for the physics lesson.
But to be more serious, as I should be, considering the topic, I thought these metaphors were very illuminating, especially (1) comparing disaffected men to objects with low inertial mass, and (2) comparing booms and busts in societal meaning to booms and busts in ecological systems. "All models are wrong, but some are useful," as the quote goes, and these models seem useful.
For what it's worth, I did find "Notes on the Heavenly Aeroplane" rough but comprehensible. Which makes sense given the context.
In fact, calling this new phenomenon the "Heavenly Aeroplane" offers a curious advantage: it is not readily linked to a modern ideology. It's sufficiently unusual that it resists being slotted into the easy left/right/center mappings.
I'm usually the first to declare there is "nothing new under the sun", and to seek historical parallels. While I'm sure the parts are established -- the search for meaning, the allure of violence, the sense of absurdity modernity instills (and I say this as someone who regards modernity as a net positive, imperfections acknowledged) -- this particular configuration seems novel.
I have written previously about the breakdown in shared prosperity and young men lashing out. Nobody needs to re-read that.
That said, consider also the "overproduction of elites". These surplus elites are an especially dangerous element, at least if young males.
Very few of the recent shooters/assassins have been "elites," unless I'm missing some noteworthy ones
Luigi?
Good call he counts. But most seem the standard "disaffected marginal youth" type
Elliot Rodgers also was a rich kid, IIRC. Just thr first examples to come to mind.
But more important than the spectacular stuff, the school shootings and assassinations, are the general radicalizaton of the human population of the US.
Again, to give the first example to come to mind - wasn't not so long ago and antivaxxers were strictly Nut Fringe.
Now, they are everywhere.
The "surplus elites" are all busy staffing the Trump administration and it explains their vengefulness to the people that they are purging. A guy like Stephen Miller has always been on the outside looking in, and now he finally has a role with the status that he thinks he deserves--so he's going to use a bunch of his power getting back at everybody in his elite high school/college who mocked and marginalized him. Same with Patel--truly chilling story in the NYT today about him going after agents who had worked on cases like Jan. 6 and the Mar A Lago shitter documents: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/us/politics/kash-patel-fired-fbi-agents.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mU8.XQT4.MuX1vh3SXWT4&smid=url-share
Perhaps it is more of an overproduction of people who believe they *should* be an elite, but they are not. That would suggest that the problem is not a lack of shared prosperity, but rather a lack of the ability to accept being ordinary.
I think of it as though in the olden days, the Earl had ten sons, not enough land to settle them all on, and no church to give them to
They seem to me more like the gardener's sons who believe they should be living in the manor.
Yeah the metaphor breaks down but I always understood elite overproduction as an expectation versus reality thing. People expecting to have elite opportunities and disappointed that they just have jobs. It’s great to have a job. It does a lot for you. But it doesn’t seem like much when you felt you were promised *important*, *fulfilling*, and visible work with all the accolades
I grew up post WW-II when nearly every person had been in the War (mostly men) or worked in the defense industry (mostly women). My father who had been at Pearl harbor on 12/7/1941 spent 4 years in the Pacific. He married my mother , who was working to build planes in CA when he was demobilized. The 1950s provided a very coherent cultural generation for the most part. 1950s life was largely carried on in very patriotic venues ( American Legion baseball fields were everywhere). Then came Korea. Most of my college professors had been in WWII or Korea. The 60s generation came of age in reaction to that era. The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. Catch-22 was published in 1961. We had people in the war who had coherent thoughts about war--Only about 25% of young men went to VN (college men got deferments until the lottery) The draft ended in 1975. I believe that is the significant point at which young men who now had choice moved into the world you describe. I don't think we ponder enough the change in men's lives after 1975.
GREAT insight, Kathleen McCook.
Interesting that you couch this is terms of participation and/or adjacent to U.S. wars. I've heard a few podsters over the years say that sometimes young men languish when there isn't enough of a violent outlet around. Like they need to be able to let off some adolescent steam in order to develop right or something. Personally I think it's more of an economic thing (most young men are increasingly poorer, and therefore less attractive to potential mates), but I'm wondering if they have some sort of primal point about the whole violence outlet thing.
Btw, the Draft ended in '73, the Vietnam "war" ended in '75. It was only in my head because I recently calculated the best year to be born in America (as a white dude anyway), which is 1956. People born then would be too young for the Draft (turn 18 in '74), obviously too old for Korea, and still having a balanced timeframe including most of the best economic years of America (mid-to-late 20th century) as well as modern medicine.
Paul Graham the tech billionaire, seems to agree: https://www.paulgraham.com/re.html (though he has to ramble a lot more to get to the point)
I'm sure I won't be the only one saying this, but this premise...
"Conservatives will of course go on saying that Tyler Robinson was an antifa soldier trained in a George Soros-funded BLM terrorist cell."
...is a fantasy of what you would like "conservatives" to think.
Both conservatives and leftists play this game. Don't you know, when WE do it, it's only self-defense, taken in the face of outrageous provocation, at worst a justified and measured preemptive strike.
When *they* do it, it is pure hate and aggression.
Doesn't matter who your preferred "we" and "they" are.
Not all or even most conservatives will think precisely this. But the explicitly conspiratorial ones (you may have noticed there are quite a few) will produce a diverse and unpredictable variety of theories resembling this one. And the two thirds of Republican voters who think the 2020 election was stolen? If this guy ever attended a meeting of an activist group, Trump could find some language about "direct action" and describe it as a Ford Foundation-funded terrorist training camp, in which case why would the average Republican voter disagree?
Can't say I blame Freddy. There is clearly some level of personal danger involved in talking about what he omits.
Mr deBoer is, no doubt, too polite and modest to mention this . . . but please, spell his name correctly. It is right there at the top of the essay.
You are correct.
“My point, which you will either accept or won’t…”
I think a lot of people will be turned off by your physics analogies. For me they work, it’s the same idea as Asimov’s psychohistory in the Foundation series which is one of my favourite stories (the OG epic sci-fi story about what if humans were predictable en masse like particles in thermodynamics. Have you read it or did you come up with this independently?)
Anyway, physics analogies aside, to me your overall thesis here is so obviously true that for people to not accept it, it’s either motivated reasoning because it’s so bleak (the implications of extremely online young men are so far-reaching that better to pretend it’s not true, something Scott Alexander has written about) or its cynical partisans trying to score political points.
For anyone who cares about societal systems-level thinking written in an accessible way that isn’t steeped in Critical Theory, I don’t see anywhere in the current world writing on this better than right here. All these Ivy humanities departments looking for a way to have useful scholarship in the post-Social Justice era should hire you.
(Totally irrelevant to the topic under discussion, but I ended up majoring in economics as an undergraduate because it was the closest field I could find to psychohistory. 😀)
I admit I'm one of those a bit "turned off" with the physics analogies. But it's not because I don't find it interesting (I do), it's just that I don't think comparing sentient beings' cause and effect to, like you say, physics particles, is an honest predictor of outcomes...even though that prediction may be reliable. I mean 'honest' in a genuine sense more than a true sense here. Despite being heavily agnostic, I do believe that we are more than the sum of our parts. In other words I don't think that human consciousness is merely a collection of the trillions of neurons firing off in our brain, but rather something more than that. I don't know what to call it.
Perhaps I'm just unable to make that leap from the millions of intricacies and raw wonder of human behavior to the stolid world of game theory predictions. Mapping out the human experience into some kind of grand equation feels just so "inhuman" to me. Maybe that's why it's hard for me to buy into it, because I'm "feeling" rather than "thinking"? As much as I find something like Asimov's Foundation fascinating, I'm also rather put off by it precisely because it attempts to reduce humanity down to mathematics. And I find that enormously depressing. :-/
FWIW, the argument is that the number of variables is massive. Massive enough to make what is actually a deterministic process appear random or unpredictable.
Yeah I get that. A zillion different paths that, unique in that they have enough inertia to free themselves from the dampening constraints, do not fly wildly out in random directions, but rather converge back to a common point in space: i.e. a spectacular act of public violence. I'm just saying it's a bit weird for me personally to dilute that down to an equation. These are human beings we're talking about, not variables.
But to argue within that premise, I'm wondering if these S.A.P.V.'s are merely the most public and vivid of outcomes from this. Like we focus on these endings precisely because they are so spectacularly publicly violent. How many others, freed of the dampening constraints, have different endings? I would argue a great amount more end in suicide (a.k.a. Spectacular Acts of Private Violence). Or even many, many times more: quietly living out the rest of your life in hopeless apathy: a.k.a Mundane Acts of Private Passivity.
All of this is to say we can process these things down into explainable mathematical theories all we want, but when we do so we (imho) tend to remove the undefinable human spirit from the equation too.
I mean, in the sense of classical physics, free will is an impossibility and the universe is deterministic.
Hey, the 1800s called, they want their pre-quantum nihilist physics arguments back 😆
How quantum physics would affect the question of free will isn't exactly clear. It's not like quantum uncertainty manifests itself in any meaningful sense in the macro world.
I think you make a good point about the bias of visibility here. More generally, it can be awfully difficult to distinguish between "process" and "outcome" -- it's much easier to put a violent death into the "outcome" category than it is to put a multi-decade habit of video game addiction there, though one might persuasively call both things "outcomes" of the same social circumstances, the latter being much more common than the former.
But we are, by nature, primed to define spectacular acts (violent and otherwise) as "outcomes," and assign to them particular significance. Habitual behaviors, in contrast, are more likely to evade our attention.
Yeah I agree, the spectacle of it all is what draws us in.
I'm wondering what's more heartbreaking here: one man lashing out and killing someone in cold blood, or a million men living out their lives in quiet desperation? Obviously there's a whole lot in between there, not to mention all of the much more likely fulfilling lives of men on the other side of the coin. I guess focusing on the gun violence part of the 'male' problem (for lack of a better term) feels more than a little disingenuous to me because of the 99.9% of males in similar "desperate" situations that do NOT lash out with a rifle. To me, that's where the real problem lies. And not with guns themselves.
I think the danger in physics analogies is in forgetting that they are, after all, mere analogies. They will all inevitably reach their limits of comparison. The behavior of complex social/cultural/political systems is of course going to diverge from the behavior of complex physical systems.
But of course, this applies to all analogies of other subjects to human affairs, not just Freddie's. And we've got plenty of old shop-worn ones whose limitations are usually ignored (infection and disease are popular ones, are are maturation and aging, traveling, combat, sports, etc.).
So I do find value in examining novel analogies, rather than just trotting out the same ones again and again. They can help us examine things in a new way, and perhaps get at different aspects of reality more easily. We just need to remain equally conscious of their limits, and not get over-excited by their novelty.
Neither LV nor Lyapunov are physics analogies. Adapting heuristics across domains is both generally possible and scientifically legitimate, and---for a blog post---our author has done an admirable job in doing so. We may not live our lives for the sake of dynamic systems, but that does not mean we are exempt from their outcomes: no matter how complex those outcomes are.
Also, stochastic inputs work as well as deterministic ones in many dynamical systems, including these two. The free will conversation is orthogonal to the substance of the post.
There are some existentialism adjacent ideas floating around in this two part series of posts, both of which are very good. Basically, as the old slogan goes "existence precedes essence." We are thrown into the world prior to any attempt to make sense out of it. These lost young men are trying to create meaning, I agree, but what should also be highlighted is that basically everything works this way.
To put it another way. Say you were born around the year 2005. You grow up in an environment of immense political and ideological decay. You have a strong feeling that something is wrong and that society is not organized in a way that is to your liking. The traditional explanations coming from organized religion and mainstream politics are kind of like figures in a wax museum. They still exist, in so far as that can be called existing, but they are crude facsimiles of a time in which they were living and breathing with real power, explanatory or otherwise. The schools don't expose you to much else. Most people go through the entirety of their formal education without ever touching classics in the Western philosophical tradition, for example.
So, they turn to the internet to try and find answers. The whole thing goes like a bad DIY home improvement project. The advice they get is the blind leading the blind, confusion piled on confusion, and whatever ad hoc ideology they conjure up would be laughed at by a professional craftsman. I agree that this is all biproduct of ideological decay. I even see the far right "traditionalist" crowd in a similar manner, only their answer to the problem is to pretend that nothing has changed and that Christianity its associated values is something other than a museum piece in 2025.
"I even see the far right "traditionalist" crowd in a similar manner, only their answer to the problem is to pretend that nothing has changed and that Christianity its associated values is something other than a museum piece in 2025."
I'd say that the far right traddies are Exhibit A.
Sohrab Ahmari or Adrian Vermeule being two prime examples - let's pretend Americans are traditionalist Catholics when they are not and have never been, then to make the numbers sort of work we'll import lots of nominal Catholics from Latin America but we'll just pretend that they're really mostly Catholic integralists at heart but they don't know it yet and all the evidence indicates otherwise and then something happens and viola! "Muh Republic of The Virgin Mary", Sohrab is El Jefe Maximo. For the benefit of The Faith, of course.
These guys make dorm room bull session leftists look like cold calculating realists by comparison.
"...the blind leading the blind,"....
One thing I've been thinking about "Gen Z" as a professor who works with them on the regular is that there is a really stark break between their generation and older generations because, of course, social media. Specifically what I mean is that they expect and we are expected to (by parents, administrators) meet them on their level, to a degree. Certainty more so then when I was a student, where the expectation was that it was our responsibility to learn from older folks, not the responsibility of professors to make sure that what they teach is relatable or whatever.
What many in Gen Z do because of the cloistering into phones and social media is that they are mostly reading and interacting with folks of their own generation, the memes and the insider language and apps and all. They don't know how to interact with folks outside of their phones (e.g. yesterday I was hiking on a trail and passed a young woman looking at her phone, trying to get a signal to make sure she was on the right path. Instead of simply asking me, friendly and experienced hiker, she looked to her phone...I kept hiking). They advise each other because it seems like older generations simply don't understand them. Whether this is "true" is a moot point because that is the perception pushed forward by pretty much everyone, making their loneliness and isolation a self fulfilling prophecy.
All this talk about the harm of smartphones and the ensuing policy changes such as bans on phones in schools elides the fact that this tech divides everyone, not just Gen Z. They are made to be a scapegoat of sorts for what is clearly a much larger problem.
It's always kind of been like this though. I remember a lot of chatter when I was in college about how more people followed American Idol than political elections, which was true. Our media ecosystem, long before the phones, was built with surgical precision to entertain and monopolize attention, not to inform or educate. The phones may have made it worse, but the dynamic precedes them by many years.
The problem is, we still need meaning and explanation. You can distract yourself with reality TV or TikTok all day long, but at some point everyone starts wondering, "Why?" No amount of distraction will plug that hole, certainly not for everyone. Social media, or media in general, was not built to do this task and is very, very bad at it. It's a little like walking into a clothing store and asking where they keep the miter saws...but in this metaphor the clothing store in the only game in town.
When everything's an app, you expect things to be served up to you. If not, rank 1-star.
Even our laziness is demanded as a service. We want ChatGPT to cheat for us. Having to go out and find a classmate to write a paper for us is too much work. 1-star.
Great comment and good fresh analogies (figures in a wax museum!)
All of these old structures that ceased to have any power in about 1970 or so, but hang around like … yeah, museum pieces.
Honestly bizarre how much Millennials (I am one) and Gen-X, the generations at the peak of societal power right now, pretend that any of the old societal meaning-structures have any power anymore. For young Gen-Z men they are nonexistent.
I think you’re right. More then “they don’t have access” it is a lot like “there’s no “there” there.” I am thinking of my childhood going to temple on special holidays. Mainly I paid zero attention and counted lights and windows, but then we’d go out to lunch or have a family dinner and the whole day felt, well, whole. The temple was not so much a meaning-maker for me (although now it kind of is, though I still rarely go!) as it was a container. Most of this population is just completely uncontained. We are reaching out to them from another works entirely, and maybe it doesn’t translate. OTOH, I don’t think this is universal. My daughter loves going to temple, my son does not. But I know it serves, just as our nightly family dinners serve.
Some of the things I had to look up while reading this essay:
Galleanist bombings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_bombings
Camillo Berneri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Berneri
You are an excellent and thought provoking writer. I have three sons in their 20’s, I have long felt that the certain segments of society that dismiss and often demonize anything male are going to bring about terrible consequences.
Seriously Freddie, I don’t know you but have been reading you for a decade (right through Twitter meltdowns and institutionalization) and a paying subscriber for 16 months.
The idea of a mentally ill (bipolar) person in the depths of newborn baby sleep deprivation being the one to invent Asimov’s psychohistory for real is almost too pat as a story.
The problem is: so is a person descending into madness thinking equations can explain extremely complex societal phenomena when it’s actually just nonsense.
There’s really good stuff here, but given your essay the other day about feeling like you’re falling into old patterns with Substack Notes and sleep deprivation, I do confess to feeling somewhat worried about you.
Edit: yes, I did post two different top-level comments. The point of each of them is different enough (my two different reactions to this essay) that I didn’t want to combine them.
I have my own issues with these two posts but legitimate expressions of concern may best be offered via email?
Fair point.
To me, this blog has always been very open about writing about these issues (in fact it’s the theme of many, many essays) and so is fair game for a comment section.
If Freddie asks, I’ll delete this thread.
A fair and reasonable point and plan.
For what it's worth, the theoretical ideas in this piece seemed natural and appropriate and sober to me, not wild or fanciful or stretched. I'm a mathematician, so these sorts of models are everyday thinking for me, which probably makes my judgement either *more* or *less* relevant to assessing Freddie's state of mind. I'm not trying to do that assessment here, but I just wanted to provide a counterpoint to the "this is crazy talk" perception that naturally occurs when someone starts talking about Chaos theory. Given that this piece displays a high degree of internal coherence and real correspondence with the theory, this kind of thing isn't *necessarily* crazy talk.
Agree, from similar perspective. Applying physics model-fitting (or pure math, but more frequently physics-inflected math) to anything and everything, but especially to population-scale social dynamics and other systems is a pretty common topic of discussion among startup folks with physics, symbolic systems, data science etc backgrounds. ie Freddie’s post here is a worthy addition to one of a large number of discussions that happen hundreds (thousands?) of times each day when startup-y hard science/math model-builders shoot the shit.
Note the complement, which is the point 🙃
There's a difference between offering mathematical concepts as a metaphor and claiming them as a dispositive description of society's behavior.
I'm comfortable with the first, not so comfortable with the second, but it may come more naturally to Marxists who are used to viewing history as a data source from which deterministic predictions about the future can be made.
I have little to add to the comments but find much of FdB’s take, which demands much from the reader, to be compelling. It has always seemed to me that ideologically pigeon-holing violent actors is a superficial and mistaken approach, so there’s that. They’ve always just seemed textbook compulsive. But noting that the building circumstances add up to a delicately balanced potential awaiting a catalyst is an observation that is borne out by a famous historical example: the beginning of World War I. If you don’t know the story check it out. We’ve been living with the consequences ever since.
I'm not any kind of mental health expert but I am a public librarian... which weirdly enough means I have lots of first-hand experience dealing with folks in the grips of paranoid delusion. I've also seen first hand a lot of the writing output of people experiencing delusion - schizophrenic glossolalia. I had a similar first impression with this piece (and moreso with the previous one), sufficiently so that I worried about Dr. deBoer's mental health. This kind of esoteric-scientific model for understanding the world is, after all, a really common manifestation of delusion. After I considered that first impression I decided it was an overreaction. I have two reasons.
One is that Dr. deBoer is presenting these ideas as metaphorical, as a useful framework for understanding a phenomenon but not as a 1:1 model. In my experience, someone presenting a paranoid delusion presents it with certainty and with the contention that it is an accurate representation of reality. Dr. deBoer is not. He is saying "here is a useful metaphor for understanding a social phenomenon."
Second and relatedly, Dr. deBoer's 'model' does not claim to predict. Rather, the whole core is that it explains why things are uncertain and unpredictable. Delusory 'models of reality' that I have seen have always purported to be accurate predictive mechanisms, usable tools. Dr. deBoer's observations in this piece and the prior one offer after-the-fact understanding and a framework to very broadly predict future trends, but do not suggest any way to actually predict events.
In short, uncertainty is baked into this framework. In my (admittedly limited!) experience, "I have a model for the world" type delusions are presented with utter certainty and make claim to total accuracy.
"I'm not any kind of mental health expert but I am a public librarian," is such an indictment of the psychiatric "system". Exactly the outcome FdB excoriates here regularly. As a public library user you have my sympathy and gratitude.
Thanks Freddie. Enlightening. Knowledge is power.
It was useful to have read this after reading a similar take at Infinite Scroll. You’re making a similar point in very different ways
As a mathematician I am suspicious of mathematics as metaphor, but I agree that it's a dynamical system in which no individual act carries much meaning and in which ideology is not usefully considered as a controlling variable. What I think is missing here is the possibility of generational change and cultural evolution. Some of today's 20 year olds will grow up into 40 year olds with children. And by virtue of the fact that they decided to have children, disproportionately represented among them will be people who have found meaning and don't want their children to suffer the same internet disease that they suffered. New movements and new structures might emerge. (Or we all might die. That's the way evolution works.)
Except not many of them will have children at current rate. Fertility collapsing, and while there’s no stats, my guess is it’s worse along the extremely-online.
"...my guess is it’s worse along the extremely-online."
That backs up the OP's point though--the extremely online will be bred out because they fail to reproduce.
>>the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture<<
REALLY felicitous phrase, and yeah, that was my hit, too. This is a kid lashing out against his upbringing in a way that kids have been doing since time immemorial, the irony being that had he chosen to lash out in a less spectacular way so that he made it to 50, the odds are he would have ended up a Mormon Republican exactly like the rest of his family.
I disagreed completely with Kirk's ideology, but he was spot on in his analysis that young men need STRUCTURE and SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN in the physical world.
It's crazy that the Left isn't picking up on this. (No, I don't believe in "Left" or "Right" either, but often, it's a convenient shorthand.)
I think the "progressive" Left offers very clear and fixed ideology for young men to believe in. Why they're not interested is left as an exercise.... :)
Really? What are they?
I would contest this. The progressive left -- e.g. the thing that once dominated Twitter and spent the days of 2020-or-so ending careers, and now rules its Potemkin kingdom of Bluesky -- is a collection of often-contradictory memes, brought up or ignored in the constant power struggles. Not that any ideology is without contradictions, I'm afraid that's a part of being human, but it's particularly bad in this case.
But yes, we can both agree that "white man bad lol" is not a great start for a unifying ideology.
Conceded. I have always been accused of being behind the times :)
"Potemkin kingdom of Bluesky" is stellar.
I'd say it's not the absence of these pillars of society like the family, the church in these young men's mind because many have them – the Kirk shooter seems to and many Islamic perpetrators of mass violence had community and religion. But all are unmoored by the internet's respect of no viewpoints and de-emphasis of the real world, in favour of allegiance to a thousand causes.
I think that we'll increasingly live in a time of rising violence is correct. It's a common symptom of future shock, which we are no more immune to than the anarchists of the 1900s or the 1970s. 'Futsies' as they're called in Mega City One where they're a regular occurrence...
I've got a math PhD and I Approve This Message. 👍
But seriously, the mathematical models and analogies you're using do make sense to me (and the 2 or 3 nitpicks I could make don't change the fundamental validity). I also couldn't tell you if this model is empirically correct or, assuming it is, if this phenomenon is at the point of criticality, but thanks for describing a terrifying possibility!
I'm a bit of an AI doomer, but honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if AI just amplifies the term in the equation previously occupied by The Algorithm, driving up the Lyapunov exponent, leading to increasing social chaos (and Chaos) of this sort. One way or another, I'm not optimistic about the future.
Come for the social commentary, stay for the physics lesson.
But to be more serious, as I should be, considering the topic, I thought these metaphors were very illuminating, especially (1) comparing disaffected men to objects with low inertial mass, and (2) comparing booms and busts in societal meaning to booms and busts in ecological systems. "All models are wrong, but some are useful," as the quote goes, and these models seem useful.
For what it's worth, I did find "Notes on the Heavenly Aeroplane" rough but comprehensible. Which makes sense given the context.
In fact, calling this new phenomenon the "Heavenly Aeroplane" offers a curious advantage: it is not readily linked to a modern ideology. It's sufficiently unusual that it resists being slotted into the easy left/right/center mappings.
I'm usually the first to declare there is "nothing new under the sun", and to seek historical parallels. While I'm sure the parts are established -- the search for meaning, the allure of violence, the sense of absurdity modernity instills (and I say this as someone who regards modernity as a net positive, imperfections acknowledged) -- this particular configuration seems novel.